


man of my word

by actualmuseofspace



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Codependency, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Musical References, Non-Linear Narrative, SEP, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 18:54:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14921010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualmuseofspace/pseuds/actualmuseofspace
Summary: Gabe made Jack a promise. Now he has to keep it.





	man of my word

“I promised you, Jack. I promised you.”

(Jack and Gabe and a million things swirl into one multicolor spiral. Reaper is careful not to breathe.)

“No, wait, Gabe-”

“Don’t go saying I’m not a man of my word, now.”

-

His roommate is unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether exceptionally blonde.

No, really.

Jack Morrison, born and raised in Indiana with lemon bright hair and enough charm his smile feels real. He's like watching 4K television when all you've known is SD.

Gabe doesn’t make a habit of judging people based on what they look like. They’re all here because they’re good soldiers. Looking at Morrison, however, all he can see is dependability, someone he already trusts.

Their introductions go like this:

“Jack Morrison.”

“Gabriel Reyes.”

“Nice to meet you, Reyes.”

“Two syllables, Jackie.”

He doesn’t know how, but Jack Morrison has become his friend.

-

When Reaper sees Jack, wearing a jacket Gabe can't remember him owning, the line defines itself.

When he's alone, Reaper-and-Gabe are a frayed rope, interwoven between each other. With Sombra, Widow, Reaper knows who he is. Watching Jack, still being a leader, even if his distaste is woven into his stance, Gabe knows who he is.

He's always favored shotguns, but as Reaper he's able to hold two at once. Seeing Jack makes him tempted to put one away. Seeing Jack makes his nanobots rush straight up, like they could turn the owl mask they've been programmed to make into a beanie, into a face.

They're both old, now, old and scarred and weathered. You can't see Reaper's scars, but Gabe's are clear, seen over his entire body.

If he turns away from the battle, he doesn't know who he is. If he turns away, he sees people he recognizes as "team", and when he turns back, he sees people that rattle in his bones as team. When he's turning, he doesn't know how to act.

The line is a blurry thing. He knows Widowmaker has one too, sees it in the moments between a breath and a shot and a kill. For Reaper, it's in the moments when he sees Jack.

-

SEP is kind of like high school, in that they all don’t know how to fit into their skin anymore. A few people have gained a few inches, and most have gained a lot of muscle, but the strength that underlies it all is the real disbalancer. They haven’t sparred in ages because people keep getting hurt accidentally, not knowing what pain feels like in these new bodies, not knowing how far is dangerous.

Of course, in high school Gabe kept his head down and did his work, and now he teases Jack for doing the same thing.

They even have classes, although they mostly seem to be to occupy their time. They all have different strengths, and no one seems keen on generalizing, nor does anyone seem to be pushing that.

Gabe gets good at pretending that he’s not on fire from the cocktail they pump through him as he pretends to learn what he knows by heart.

SEP is kind of like the army, in that it technically still is. It’s easy to forget that under the movie nights and the kitchen table the eat off of, they still belong to the military. Their ranks have been forgotten, but when they stop constantly shifting, they start training again, and the way the military works has not.

They’re a team, just them, and it’s funny how fast they seem to work well together. Whoever selected them knew what they were doing, because as a unit, they seem perfectly calibrated for what they're doing.

Leadership is tricky when there's no ranks to fall back on. He looks to Jack, Jack looks to him, and Jack won't admit it, but everyone else looks at them as a pair. They find a habit in it, a dividing of responsibilities. Gabe can’t even think about fighting with Jack, so he doesn’t worry about running into a conflict one day.

SEP is kind of like high school, kind of like the military, but mostly it’s hell.

-

When he was Gabriel Reyes, he had 3 sisters, two younger and one older, and they all knew everything about him in painful, painful detail. He doesn’t forget that until he dies.

Now that he's just plain Reaper, all he's got is Sombra to take his place. She's like a sister because she's just as annoying and just as nosy, but when he can he's glad his sisters never had to be her.

Sombra seems old and young in the same way he feels free and controlled. When they have time, and she's decided to grace him with her presence, she watches animated movies and cracks bad jokes and throws popcorn at him when she's annoyed. When they don't have time, and she's decided to grace him with her presence, she prods him into doing what she wants with facts about him he barely remembers and doesn't want to know.

Younger sisters do that. They keep you up at odd hours but only because they need your help, even if they don't know how to say it. You love them and you can't possibly be irritated with them.

There's little knowledge loss between Reaper and Gabe. The conversion would be useless if there were. So he knows all of this, and he believes all of this, and he doesn't incinerate the popcorn she throws at him, because that would be in poor spirit.

-

On the days when the latest shot of whatever chemicals the doctors have decided to use today is enough to cripple them, their schedules are always cleared. Someone will drop off food at the doors, since if they’re bad enough to skip “class”, they’re bad enough to not go out for anything.

On those days, and Gabe’s not sure when they started, Jack will bring down his laptop with all of the superhero movies he could find downloaded, cram into their bunk, and press play. He has it on a loop, so Gabe has the first few memorized at this point.

Jack doesn’t, though. He wakes up for his favorites, but his preferred method for dealing with pain goes something like this:

“Wake me up when he’s almost dead, okay?”

“That’s not this movie.”

“Huh. Guess I’m half asleep already.”

“How are you planning on sleeping?”

“I dunno.”

Jack always manages to fall asleep in a minute or two. It must be some kind of special power, to sleep off pain like that.

Gabe thinks he's pretty lucky to get Jack for a roommate, because he's smart enough to know the movies are for his benefit. When Jack is awake, Gabe can practically feel Jack tracing the movements as they're about to happen, he's seen them so many times. Gabe's pretty lucky to have Jack.

-

Widowmaker and Reaper have no differences. They are both systematic, efficient, brainwashed into being perfect. Widowmaker and Reaper are a good team because they are predictable internally and deadly externally. No one has to remind them to keep the line clear, because they never chatter.

Sombra hates it, about them. Sombra hates it, because she’s like Reyes. She’s anger and innocence and raw power, a skill that has changed even her biology. When Sombra works with them, both Widowmaker and Reaper are forced to remember they were like her, once. Widowmaker has it easier; she does not remember the name Amalie. Reaper and Gabe are still trying to pretend they're one; he still responds to Gabe even though he hates Sombra knows the name.

Reaper hates it because Reaper hates anything that reminds him of who he used to be.

So Widowmaker and Sombra and Reaper are a good team because as much as it’s nice to be a predictably brilliant sniper, sometimes you need a little free will to make something pull off, and Sombra has a knack for drawing it out of Reaper.

Jack, though, has a way of calling out Gabe, because when Sombra calls the cracks into existence, Gabe just misses Jack, just wants to surface long enough to see him.

-

"What if they break us up?" Jack looks up from his cafeteria fair salad, although Gabe can only see the sudden movement of blonde hair.

"Wow, Jackie, a little heavy for lunch." Gabe has one hand holding his sandwich, the other flicking a tablet to scan through their heavily filtered news. "Besides, why would they do that?"

"I dunno."

They're sitting alone at a table. It's not that no one else is eating lunch, but most people are exhausted. Ironically, it means the kitchen is quiet, which Gabe thinks is the best kind of place to be exhausted in.

"I just-"

"You worry too much."

"I worry the right amount." Jack always says this, always rolls his eyes a few seconds delayed after. "I worry the right amount."

"Nah, you worry too much."

"I think the consensus is that you worry more than me."

"You can't pull at anecdotal evidence for this. Anyway, it's not my fault you smile all the time."

"I can smile all I fucking want."

"Wow, getting a little aggressive, Jackie."

"Wow, it's almost like I take our future seriously."

The conversation lulls for a few moments. Gabe takes a few more bites from his sandwich.

"I don't know if I can do this without you."

"You won't have to."

"Can you prove it?"

-

Gabe doesn’t remember the fight. He can’t let himself, finds it hard to breath, more literal than metaphorical, if he tries to remember what happened. There’s a gap, a self created gouge separating Gabe and Reaper, and the moment of transformation is far, far down, where it could never be retrieved.

Talon doesn't answer his questions about it. The organization seems to have a sort of grin about the subject as a whole, an attitude of letting him know they know, but not saying anything. When he first woke up, angry and scared and alone, they let him believe that it was his fault, let him believe it wasn't, seemed to agree with anything he said and all with the same attitude that made him feel childish.

Now that he's been on his own, he questions whether or not he was involved. In the early days, Sombra would make him watch newsreels of himself. ("Not 'cause I wanna make you remember, but because you have a nice ass, and I want you to learn to make it.") He couldn't remember them, not then. He remembers watching the face, familiar but foreign, thinking how comfortable him and Jack looked together.

He watches them on his own now. At first, Sombra had to help him set it up, but he would watch, and remember saying the words. ("It's okay, I get it - you don't want to remember, you want to work on your ass.") He and Jack worked so well together, he remembers how they would write their speeches the night before.

They still avoid the ones closer to Zurich, but he can't believe they would be responsible. It seems weird, seems wrong. He doesn't know how to fit it into anything.

-

The original six, from back before the UN stuck their talons into everything, they used to curl up together on the couch and watch movies or play video games or do anything they could to pretend a little while longer they weren't fighting a war.

When they came together, they were all seasoned soldiers. Not a single one of them had it in their head that the six of them alone were changing anything, and while they operated outside of any particular military, they knew it wouldn't be long before someone pulled sway over them.

Even after Jack got his promotion, even after they were pushed to the edges of who they could become, they still found a couch where no one could find them.

The six of them could barely fit on a couch, but they made it work with an incredible lack of regard for personal space, and they watched movies or video games or things they did before they fought a war and became international figureheads for global peace. (Or not, in Liao and Gabe's case.)

It was the only time that they would shut Fareeha and Jesse and Bridgette and everyone else out. Sometimes, the world narrows down to who you've died for.

-

Reaper remembers. He remembers the anger, he remembers the way their voices couldn't rise, they were too tired to even go through the steps.

Reaper remembers. He remembers their caustic phrases, tossed back and forth like they didn’t have anywhere to land.

Reaper remembers. Reaper remembers the pain, and it’s the sharpest thing he has to hold on to. Reaper remembers, even if Gabe doesn't.

-

“What, are you gonna make me promise, Jackie?”

“Yeah,” Jack says, mouth half full. “Yeah, I am."

**Author's Note:**

> Ironic that I posted this like 4 days later than I meant to, no?
> 
> Thank you for reading.
> 
> Next work I plan to have up is all the way in October, a Harry Potter fic about Cedric Diggory.


End file.
